Building Sn3 and N Worlds

By Stationmaster

All things must end eventually

Many years ago, I really splurged and bought an imported (Korea) brass model of a Union Pacific 3-Unit Gas Turbine Electric Locomotive.  The three pieces are:   The front regular diesel cab; The middle piece held a full-on jet engine attached to a generator to drive the wheels;. The third piece is a tank to hold the thick cheap oil that was burned in the turbine.  

It is an excellent model with scale everything.  Perfect!  It pulled thirty plus  freight cars on my N scale layout in our house here in Durango no problem.  When we moved, I also started building a new layout which would be DCC - digital command control.  That meant I had to send the locomotive to a professional to install a sound decoder.  Brass locos make me nervous.   Once returned, it continued to pull many many cars on the new layout and the sounds were right on thanks to the decoder.

A few months ago, something was wrong. The model had run many distances, and the front power truck had come loose.  Something(s) were broken so I sent it off to a brass model specialist to repair.  The response was that a part was broken and repair parts were not available and cannot be made - the manufacturer was out of business and gone.  So I had a dead locomotive.  Beautiful but dead.

So I decided it needed a better place than a box so I bought a plastic display case, fit in a wooden base, and layed some N Scale track.  I painted the rails and ties, and then ballasted the track with scale rock - UP color.  

Not I get to see it every day and while it no longer runs, it provides much enjoyment.  I took of the cover for the photo.

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